Good morning all you people in internetland… that’s right the forced cheerfulness means I had another one of my bouts of insomnia. Last night it was not so much that I had another panic attack, it was more one of my classic “can’t shut brain off” nights. I wound up getting back out of bed and coming upstairs and building in Minecraft. After about an hour that calmed me down enough to be able to actually sleep. But of course this will put me a little over an hour under my normal sleep schedule… and I am feeling immensely groggy this morning. Coffee… take me a way!
Scavenger of Hunts
Yesterday I essentially did what I stated I was going to do. I knocked out my guild harvesting daily and then proceeded to start working my way through the old world summerfest scavenger hunts. Overall they were pretty fun, a few of them were more tedious than others. Several of them taught me things about the zones they were in that I didn’t know. For example I had no clue that all of the lakes in Moonshade are actually connected by a series of waterways, and that you can swim from one end to the other without breaking the surface.
The most annoying of them was a quest that starts in Iron Pine Peaks at the Chancel of Labors and involves taking ice cream to a NPC in Shimmersand before it melts. You can teleport between the zones without issue, but my problem is that I always seem to get lost in Shimmersand and never can figure out which path goes where. So it took a couple of tries for me… and after failing the first time I spent a little bit of effort trying to figure out the best route to the quest target.
After wrapping these up I started in on the newer scavenger hunts, starting with the continent of Dusken. The first couple were relatively easy and just involved roaming around until you found the correct item. When I got to Seratos things got considerably more annoying. That task involved collecting a “Mystic Skull”, and pretty much all of them in the zone are hidden behind some sort of jumping puzzle. I got mine from above a Storm Legion camp, that involved a mixture of off mount and mounted jumps to reach the prize. I never could actually get up where the skull itself was… but I was able to get within reach of being able to loot it.
From what I have read, it seems as thought Steppes of Infinity is the king of all jumping puzzles… so that one pretty much halted my progress for the evening. Tonight hopefully I will get in at some point and continue on with doing the Brevane Scavenger hunts. I just reached a point where I was done with mini-games for the day. I am honestly shocked that each individual scavenger hunter quest does not reward better than it actually does. When you complete each zone objective you only get 25 Summerfest Merit Badges. This seems a bit daunting when the extra happy spiffy rings are 3000.
Spires of Bone
Seratos… otherwise known as “I hope you like random spires of bone and flesh and the color purple”. This zone is pretty much a love song to a Death Rift. So much of what is going on here… would give me nightmares if I stopped to think about it. Pretty much the most creepy thing in the zone are these mountain ridges… that when you get up closer to them turn out to be giant molars. Essentially this is the land of the shapers, that harvest flesh and then repurpose it into new shapes. Originally you are thinking… okay they build undead abominations and such… but no it doesn’t stop there.
Pretty much EVERYTHING in the zone is made of bone or flesh. Nothing says death like a nice rotting flesh armoire. I have this odd relationship with the zone… so much of it tweaks the “cool” factor for my inner thirteen year old that still wants everything to be covered in skulls and crossbones. On the other side, the adult in me finds this whole theme deeply unsettling and something out of a Lovecraft or Barker novel. At least there are no skinless corpses walking around, because seriously that would push it over the edge for me.
My favorite of the abominations… are these creepy floating things with two giant arms and a scorpion like tail… and instead of a head they have another small pair of arms holding a weird china geisha mask in place where a head should be. Whoever designed that thing is seriously disturbed… and also rather brilliant. Quite honestly every single thing in Seratos is equally twisted, and it gives the entire zone this deeply disturbing feeling as you level through it. After I finished with the warm and happy summerfest adventures… this is where I chose to go to work on Belgrave my rogue.
Seratos also has the distinction of being the first major step up in content difficulty on the new continents. I noticed this on my warrior, and it even seems moreso on my rogue. The mobs seem to have more hitpoints, take longer to kill and do nastier things to me. I remember a similar step up in difficulty around 58 in Morban or Kingsward. The game is not playing around, and will happily dismember you… which is fitting for the zone I am leveling through.
I managed to ding 55 and hopped over to Belghast and crafted myself a nifty set of swords. You can see them in the above screenshot… the Insidious Vicious Karthite Saber. They have a crazy glowing techblade feel to them, which feels fitting for the forbidden tech aspect of the entire Storm Legion expansion. They look especially slick when I have them enchanted with my lighting graphic planar dexterity buff. I pretty much worked on this guy up until the point I took my evening walk.
No Trials, No Tricks, No Traps?
Normally I am the biggest cheerleader for Trion on the planet. While I have played Rift off and on over the last two years… there has only been about a three month period that I was not actively subscribed to it. I can go on and on about how awesome a company it is.. and how good of an experience it is playing it. But be warned I have a bit of a rant to get off my chest. There is still a support ticket in play mind you… so this all may resolve itself, but I still feel like I need to say something.
I am an organizer of people… I seem to have the ability to gather up a bunch of awesome folks and get them working towards a focused goal. As a result in the last week or so House Stalwart on Faeblight has gone from 5 people to roughly 35. A lot of these individuals were former Rift players, and their transition has been fairly seamless. Something of note… almost every single one of our guild members is an actively paying Patron. The problem I have run into is with the transition of players who never played Rift before, and are just now giving it a shot.
It was the assumption of pretty much everyone in my guild that when you started paying for Patron, you would unlock a lot of the ways your free to play account is gimped. That it would give you access to the bank and to the auction house… and more importantly restore full access to your character slots and bag slots. Having only 2 character slots and only 3 bag slots is pretty significantly and painfully gimped… but it is something you would expect for not being a paying customer. However when you start giving a monthly commitment of money… you expect those shackles to go away.
This was the assumption I had… and the assumption the other members of my guild had. So last night when one of our new to Rift members chose to bump up to Patron level access and start subscribing to the game… we were all greatly perplexed to find out that while it unlocked her bank and auction house access… it did absolutely NOTHING for her gimped number of bag slots and character slots. We all suggested that she try logging out and back in… and that did nothing. We had her submit a service ticket… and got back a completely bullshit brushoff answer linking to two topics that had nothing to do with what was going on.
We told her to resubmit the ticket, because seriously the support answer was bullshit and not related in any way at all. After doing this she started doing some reading. Quite honestly everything on the forums was confusing… but it sounded like to restore her full access she would need to buy something they kept referring to as a “game pack”. The problem is… there is no way through the accounts page or the in game store to actually “buy” the game. This whole thing is a bit of a mess… if you become a paying customer in a free to play game… you expect to be restored to the same level as other paying customers.
I still love Trion… and I still feel overall that the free to play conversion is extremely good for former Rift players. However it is starting to seem that the “No Trials. No Tricks. No Traps” mantra is a bit hypocritical when dealing with brand new players. This needs to be fixed. When a player starts subscribing to your game, they should have their account restored to a level that any sane and rational person would expect. Either that or allow them to have a one stop easy access to bump their account up to the same level as someone that has paid for the game. Buying those extra character slots and bag slots is a little egregious when someone is already committing to pay you a monthly fee for access to your otherwise free game.
Here is hoping that the second support ticket will get some resolution, and that this really is not the way they choose to do business. As a guild leader and organizer of people… I have to say this will seriously throw a massive monkey wrench in my ability to get friends that have never tried the game into it. I will now have to tell them that it will cost X dollars to restore your account to a state that you will be able to play it normally with bag slots and character slots that players expect to have with a paid membership. Here is hoping that they will listen to some reason and modify the way this works… or at the very least be a good deal more transparent about what subscribing doesn’t mean.
Wrapping Up
Well I have ran significantly over in time… and need to get on the road. I will update you guys tomorrow either way if the support ticket was successful. I hope you all have a great day and a great beginning of the work week. Tonight I had planned on popping into The Secret World since there is always a critical mass playing on Monday nights. We will have to see if I actually follow through with this, or if I instead end up back in Rift.